Poker players ante up for lessons

Recreational poker player Jackie Scott wasn't doing badly. She'd pay several hundred dollars to enter a low-stakes tournament and usually win that back, and then some.

Not satisfied, Scott, a Fort Lauderdale real estate agent by trade, went back to school. Poker school, that is.

After spending about $1,500 for a multiday poker instructional course at Sunrise-based World Poker Tour Boot Camp, Scott emerged brimming with confidence. She signed up for another class — a "champions camp" — after that.

Since then, she has upped the amount she's willing to wager, regularly spending more than $1,000 to buy into a poker tournament. But she has also significantly upped her winnings — scoring $37,000 at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in one monthly tournament, then returning the next month and taking home a $36,000 first-place prize.

"To me, the most sensible way of improving your game is not only playing, but learning more about the science of it," said Scott. "No matter how good of a player you are, you're going to walk away with some new knowledge."

Topics covered in poker instruction may include the importance of a player's position at the table, the proper bet size for various situations and when a bluff makes sense.

Classroom-type camps aren't the only option — there's a growing menu of teaching methods, including strategy websites, private tutoring and how-to books. Poker's expansive "curriculum" stands in stark contrast to the rest of the gambling universe, where players generally place their wagers and hope for the best.

The latest entrants into the teaching craze: poker pros Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius, who as part of a charity fundraiser-promotional gimmick are this week auctioning off private one-hour coaching sessions on a new website, expertinsight.com. Each has received bids in the thousands of dollars.

But even after a few expensive lessons, don't go thinking about quitting your day job.

At least 90 percent of poker players lose money in the long run, with 5 percent to 10 percent coming out ahead, according to many pros. A big reason is the share of the pot, or "rake," that the casino charges for hosting the game. Over time, the money skimmed by the casino causes many would-be winning players to be losers.

Despite those daunting odds, Chris Torina, founder and president of Deepstacks Group, says his poker students can expect to be winning players after training — even if the payoff is only a few hundred extra dollars here and there.

After starting out focused on pricy live seminars, Torina's company — in part prodded by the sour economy — branched out into a variety of learning models. There are the 1,500 or so players who pay $25 a month to subscribe to Deepstacks University, an online instructional video hub. Others show up for live boot camps taught by poker pros, and a third group learns through the company's newest innovation, Deepstacks 360 — a streaming 360-degree Internet video of live courses where online students control their point of view and chat with instructors.

"You could be sitting at home and watching a camp that's happening in Vegas, and you could be in London," Torina said.

There is no one entity that tracks how much poker players spend on self-improvement, but some estimate the various teaching outlets combined rake in tens of millions of dollars a year. Other suspect the figure is in the hundreds of millions.

"Poker players are pretty loose with money, they're not shy about spending $200 to $800 for a one-hour lesson," said poker pro, and Coconut Grove resident, Brandon Adams. Adams is founder and CEO of the new website holding its poker-pro auction this week. The site will also feature expert chats on nonpoker subjects.

In a single poker session, a player may make hundreds, or even thousands, of strategic decisions. So while luck plays a role, making better decisions can also translate into more dollars in your pocket. That's a key reason why research — even if it rises to obsessive, geek-like proportions — is so prized.

Adams' intellectual background — he graduated college at 19 and taught at Harvard University for eight years — is not all that uncommon in professional poker circles. Las Vegas poker pro Howard Lederer goes by the nickname "The Professor" because of his analytical style of play. Poker pro and Miami native Vanessa Rousso boasts of earning her bachelor's degree at Duke University in 2 1/2 years.

Rousso, too, has her own "boot camp"-type training company.

Adams is confident that players who pay for training will more than recover that cost through improved results. He's not promising students will strike it rich, however.

"Often that simply means that they lose less than they otherwise would have," Adams admits.

But there are many, especially those with decades of play under their belt, who refuse to "study up" on a game they think they know well. Others, such as Boca Raton retiree Gregory Fusillo, reject paid training on principle.

At a recent weeknight inside the poker room at Dania Jai-Alai, Fusillo, 61, hovered over the action at one table, telling players he was trying to learn. Players continued betting and raising, paying Fusillo no mind (and certainly offering no pointers), until, after 5 or 10 minutes of silent observation, Fusillo wandered off.

But even after publicly announcing his shortcomings as a player, Fusillo said he wouldn't pay a poker tutor.